Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Making Sense of History in Context

Much of the information about the shroud’s history or possible history, depending on how you interpret it, was known for a long time. It is just that no one realized that a strange statement about a burial cloth rising up on Friday’s seemed to make much sense at all. Or that the two-image segment of the Hymn of the Pearl was anything more than peculiarly strange gibberish within an epic poem. Or that the small little circles in a strange pattern drawn on Jesus’ burial cloth in that picture in the Hungarian Pray Codex meant anything. Or that a word like tetradiplon, a perfectly good word, that otherwise seems not to exist in anything ever written in Greek, was meaningful. I was a Scavone puts it, “in so many cases . . . obscurities such as this often become brightly lit when one inserts the Shroud into the context.”